Artists in Hollywood

It took about ten minutes for a smart young Manhattan art director named Reeves Lewenthal to sell his scheme to Cinema Producer Walter Wanger.

Wanger was making an ambitious movie called The Long Voyage Home, based on Eugene O'Neill's four one-act sea plays. The scheme: that Wanger import nine of Lewenthal's painters (he is head of Associated American Artists) to do scenes and characters from the movie, painted from life. The deal called for: 1) a free hand to the painters, 2) studios on the movie lot, 3) a total fee of $50,000-plus and expenses. In August the pictures will be shown at Manhattan's Associated American Artists' gallery (where Wanger and cast are scheduled to appear). Then they will be lent to any U. S. galleries that want them.

Said Director John Ford when he saw these real live painters: "This is the damnedest miscasting I ever saw." The cast: blond, amiable, plodding Grant Wood; dark, volatile Thomas Benton; shy, diminutive, big-eared Raphael Soyer, with the faraway, downhearted look of his old men and nudes; tweedy, sophisticated George Biddle; big, pink-faced Ernest Fiene; aristocratic James Chapin; athletic bachelor Georges Schreiber; big, gruff Portraitist Robert Philipp; dynamic Luis Quintanilla, famed Spanish-refugee fresco painter.

As the mass painting got under way on the studio set, cinemen & women crowded round to watch. Quintanilla, who picked for his subject the only two girls in the cast, was nicknamed "Goya." Painter Biddie and Actor John Qualen (of whom he did a portrait) played flute duets. After a ong conversation with Joan Crawford, Painter Fiene (whom Hollywood nicknamed "The Safe" because of his bulk) admitted that her legs were even more shapely than he had imagined.

Soyer declared Hollywood "an artist's paradise"--fine, free models, flunkies to run errands, set-men to build easels, chauffeurs at beck & call. When he asked whether it would be possible to get some paint rags, a mountain of rags appeared almost before the words were out of his mouth.

As a group the nine painters went swimming, played tennis, ate, drank, toured Walt Disney's studios. Every 15 minutes or so they took time out to listen to war news. As a wind-up celebration Producer Wanger (proud of his first venture into the arts) gave them a reception attended by 400 of Hollywood's Who's Who. Afterwards cinema stars were heard to declare that they were going to visit some art galleries, now that they knew how painting was done. How they had got their own paintings done was not so clear to the painters.

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